July 31, 2008

Blogs change boundaries for US news coverage

Source: Geoff Elliott, Washington correspondent, The Australian

It was in Knoxville, Tennessee where I was put in my place as a foreign correspondent covering a US election.

Democrat Harold Ford, a young, up-and-coming leader in the mould of Barack Obama, was running for a US senate seat andhe refused to answer any questions.
"We're not talking to you, you don't win us any votes," his spokeswoman helpfully informed me.

Never mind that Ford had just said in a speech that Australia wanted to pursue nuclear weapons (still waiting for a clarification on that Harold) but I'm not at all convinced his spokeswoman's premise holds, at least if it is also framed in the negative.

Ford lost the election. He lost for many reasons (the Republican attack machine that created a racially coded advertisement was disgraceful) but on substance there's a chance Ford's gaffe as I reported could have cost him a couple of votes.

My critical piece of his statement was picked up in US blogs and created much mirth on some sites, judging by the comments that flooded in.

The proliferation of these blogs and aggregating news sites on the web has already changed politics and the 24-hour news cycle, but it's about time politicians and their campaign teams (in the US, Australia and elsewhere) thought more about how they deal with foreign media that are also using these mediums to influence the narrative.

The old boundaries don't apply any more. The Drudge Report is showing that.

At the risk of sounding self-serving here, a piece I wrote in February, comparing Obama with Nelson Mandela (inasmuch as how the would-be president would struggle to match the expectations if elected) was plugged on Drudge.

It was then I witnessed first hand Drudge's extraordinary influence in such a huge political and media market. Within an hour of the link to The Australian appearing on Drudge, the phone calls and emails began and within 24 hours I had appeared on the US's National Public Radio as part of an hour-long discussion on Obama and then again nationally on Fox Radio.

My piece was picked up also in the mainstream media and on the blogs.

My colleagues have had similar experiences. Gerard Baker, the US editor of The Times of London, wrote a stunning satirical piece last week on Obama as the "chosen one". It, too, was picked up on Drudge and The Times website was swamped with comments from Americans, many of whom were saying they went to British and other international services to pick up their US political news.

Realclearpolitics.com is another mandatory site for US political watchers and it is increasingly populated with foreign press links that help set the narrative for the political news cycle in the US.

It's certainly a lot different from yesteryear.

Foreign press corps began arriving in the US in large numbers with the establishment of the UN in 1946 (they were based mostly in New York, where the UN has its headquarters).

These journalists favoured the big-picture analytical pieces that could survive the slow transmission by mail: less news and more interpretation.

Stephen Hess, a veteran of the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and a scholar at the Brookings Institution, noted the "high cost of sending cables and making telephone calls limited their contact with their editors".

Hess wrote in his book Through Their Eyes: Foreign Correspondents in the United States that these correspondents "lived by what became known as Barber's axiom, formulated by Stephen Barber, a Daily Telegraph (of Britain) correspondent: 'Happiness is in direct proportion to one's distance from the home office'."

But the instant communication phenomenon has broken down Barber's indolent maxim and now foreign correspondents in the US can become part of the news cycle beyond simply the bilateral relationship between the US and their home countries. In some cases they are helping shape that coverage too, more so than yesteryear when foreign news services, print and TV, was not instantly accessible as it is now.

Hess says he's not convinced much is really changing. Foreign correspondents will continue to whinge that they can't get enough access, despite institutions such as the Foreign Press Centre, part of the US State Department that does a superb job at trying to break down the walls for Washington's 2000 or so foreign reporters.

In the Washington Post's op-ed pages ahead of Obama's Middle East and European trip last week, Washington correspondent for Germany's Der Tagesspiegel Christoph von Marschall wrote of Obama's snub of foreign media, noting that not one European reporter was on his trip to the Middle East and Europe.

Obama has yet to conduct an interview on the campaign trail with a foreign journalist, instead focusing entirely on the US TV and cable networks, followed by the dominant US newspapers.

But both the Obama and McCain camps have offered access to foreign reporters at press conferences and even travel time.